FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT SUICIDE NOTE - PAGE 2

By Megan Twohey, TRIBUNE REPORTER and Tribune reporter Jeff Long and freelancers Andrea Brown, George Houde and Elizabeth Owens-Schiele contributed to this report | June 4, 2009

(The headline as published has been corrected in this text.) Before setting a gasoline-soaked fire in his family's Arlington Heights home, Kevin Finnerty penned a suicide note that spoke of financial troubles and his intention to harm his wife and three children even though he loved them, police said Wednesday. The 43-year-old self-employed artist left no clear explanation for the arson attack, which left his wife and eldest son dead of smoke inhalation and caused Finnerty to die of burns, authorities said.

Former South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun has died, a police official said Saturday, presumably after a fall while mountain climbing. A Roh family lawyer said he left behind suicide note. Roh had been under investigation over allegations that he took more than $6 million from a businessman while in office. The bribery scandal involving Roh and his family had tainted his image as a clean politician in a country with a long history of corruption. Roh served as president from 2003 to 2008.

Before he killed his daughter Tuesday then turned the gun on himself, John Brunson tried to explain the seemingly unexplainable. He scribbled on a suicide note--found by police--that if he could not be a part of young Mary Elizabeth's life, nobody could. "Everybody loses," Brunson wrote in his note, a copy of which was shared with the Tribune by Brunson's family. On Thursday, while Mary's mother and other family members filled an Orland Park funeral home for the 3-year-old's visitation, John Brunson's relatives sat in his home in unincorporated Lemont, trying to make sense of a horrendous tragedy--and provide a clearer picture of Brunson.

Mindy McCready apparently attempted suicide, and a man charged last spring with trying to kill her was with the country singer when police found her unconscious Friday in a Florida hotel lobby, authorities said Tuesday. William McKnight, 39, had been charged with attempted criminal homicide and aggravated burglary in an attack on the 28-year-old entertainer earlier this year. The couple had broken up about two weeks before the attack, which occurred at McCready's Nashville home.

By Reviewed by Douglas Seibold, a writer who reviews regularly for the Tribune | February 21, 1991

Portrait of the Artist With My Wife By Simon Mason Putnam, $19.95, 208 pages "Portrait of the Artist With My Wife" opens with a final statement to the world by the book's narrator, S.J., a distraught young English art critic. He is planning to kill himself, and the document that follows amounts to his lengthy, comic farewell note, the justification for both his despair and his subsequent resolve to end his life. As he puts it forth in his first few pages, S.J. has been driven to this fate by the discovery that his wife-whom he refers to by the endearment "Poppet"-has betrayed him with a friend, a garrulous, unwashed young painter named Henry Hippolytus Fluck, at whose seaside cottage they had been guests for the previous week.

The mother and prime suspect in the disappearance of a 2-year-old boy said her parental shortcomings led her to suicide, according to a letter released Tuesday. "The main reason I'm doing this is because even after my baby is found, I would not be a good mother with two jobs and full-time school," 21-year-old Melinda Duckett wrote to her grandparents. Police said Duckett shot herself Sept. 8, nearly two weeks after she reported her son, Trenton, missing.

A man accused of killing two boys this week left a note expressing love and hate before he took his own life. "Rick and Kyle are the devil," David Carter wrote of the Piecuch brothers in a suicide note that authorities released Friday. "They should not make fun of me like the pigs did last weekend when I asked for some food and help to find my mom." Authorities believe "pigs" refers to a visit Carter made Saturday morning to the Michigan City Police Department, where he asked for food and was directed to area social services.

By Jeff Coen and David Heinzmann, Tribune staff reporters | March 23, 2005

Bart Ross wrote his bitter and hateful suicide note two weeks before he killed the husband and mother of a federal judge. "When you read this I should be dead, so I am writing in past tense," he wrote in the typed, four-page letter, obtained Tuesday by the Tribune. Ross, 57, had tied a note around his neck before he shot himself on March 9, sitting in his van in a Milwaukee suburb. The note directed police to a bag; in the bag was the printed letter dated Feb. 13. The rambling letter draws upon the same harsh imagery that appeared in a decade of his legal filings in Chicago and echoes a handwritten note he sent to a local TV station: Doctors are Nazis; judges are terrorists; and he was the victim of fraud and medical malpractice.

Investigators early Thursday said a man who shot himself in the head during a traffic stop in Wisconsin had a suicide note claiming responsibility for the slaying of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow's husband and mother. Members of the task force of Chicago police and federal agents said the man's car was stopped in West Allis, near Milwaukee, about 6 p.m. As officers approached the car, the man killed himself with a gunshot to the head. Investigators said the man had a suicide note that included an admission that he shot the judge's family.

Prop: Suicide note Appearing in: "Wide Open Beaver Shot of My Heart, A Comedy With a Body Count," Rhinoceros Theater Festival Though Ian Belknap bills himself as a comedian, he is no stranger to tragedy. When he was 9 years old, his father left the family behind in Amherst, Mass., and moved to Arizona for good. "He was a hippie who embraced the counter culture without adopting its social mission," Belknap recalls. When Belknap was 20, news came that his father had died in his car from carbon monoxide poisoning.